Wireless communication devices are becoming increasingly prevalent for personal communication needs. These devices include, for example, cellular telephones, alphanumeric pagers, “palmtop” computers, personal information managers (PIMS), and other small, primarily handheld communication and computing devices. Wireless communication devices have matured considerably in their features and now support not only basic point-to-point communication functions like telephone calling, but more advanced communications functions, such as electronic mail, facsimile receipt and transmission, Internet access and browsing of the World Wide Web, and the like.
Generally, conventional wireless communication devices have software that manages various handset functions and the telecommunications connection to the base station. The software that manages all the telephony functions is typically referred to as the telephone stack. The software that manages the output and input, such as key presses and screen display, is referred to as the user interface or Man-Machine-Interface or “MMI.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,781 discloses a markup language based man-machine interface. The man-machine interface provides a user interface for the various telecommunications functionality of the wireless communication device, including dialing telephone numbers, answering telephone calls, creating messages, sending messages, receiving messages, and establishing configuration settings, which are defined in a well-known markup language, such as HTML, and accessed through a browser program executed by the wireless communication device. This feature enables direct access to Internet and World Wide web content, such as web pages, to be directly integrated with telecommunication functions of the device, and allows web content to be seamlessly integrated with other types of data, because all data presented to the user via the user interface is presented via markup language-based pages. Such a markup language based man-machine interface enables users directly to interact with an Internet application.
However, unlike conventional desktop or notebook computers, wireless communication devices have a very limited input capability. Desktop or notebook computers have cursor based pointing devices, such as computer mouse, trackballs, joysticks, and the like, and full keyboards. This enables navigation of Web content by clicking and dragging of scroll bars, clicking of hypertext links, and keyboard tabbing between fields of forms, such as HTML forms. In contrast, wireless communication devices have a very limited input capability, typically up and down keys, and one to three soft keys. Thus, even with a markup language based man-machine interface, users of wireless communication devices are unable to interact with an Internet application using conventional technology. Although some forms of speech recognition exist in the prior art, there is no prior art system to realize multi-modal web interaction, which will enable users to perform web interaction over a wireless network in a variety of ways.